Vanity Fair (magazine)
Vanity Fair is a magazine of pop culture, fashion, and politics published by Condé Nast Publications. Italian: December 2009 :Article by X, photography by Francesco Vezzoli Natalie-Portman-Vanity-Fair-1.jpg VF-Italy01.jpg VF-Italy02.jpg VF-Italy03.jpg US: The Style Issue (No. 601, September, 2010) Lady Gaga covered this issue. Lady Gaga was one of ''Time'' magazine's 100 most influential people of 2009. She is the highest-ranked newcomer on the 2010 Forbes Celebrity 100 list--coming in at No. 4--with earnings of $62 million. Barbara Walters named her one of last year's "Ten Most Fascinating People." Oprah Winfrey called her a cultural and spiritual leader. Ever since Gaga's first single, "Just Dance," went No. 1 in 2008 (first in Sweden, then Canada, then Australia, then the rest of the world), she has been a supporter of and a hero to the gay community--an audience always appreciative of outrage, flamboyance, and fashion obsessed stars. But comparisons made to other female pop stars are simply beside the point. Gaga has a much better voice than Madonna, and she's got all those serious Rachmaninoff and Beethoven piano chops. Unlike anyone else who ever sang while sitting at a piano--from Carole king to Tori Amos--Gaga has pianos that are actually part of her attire; when she performed at the Museum of Contemporary Art in L.A., her piano was designed by Damien Hirst. Unlike Cher, Whitney, or Britney, Gaga writes all of her own catchy, catchy, can't-get-them-out-of-your-head songs. She swears that she doesn't lip-synch in concert. And how can you not welcome someone who kicked all those dopey, Bush-era pop stars off center stage? The Gaga has been influenced by Grace Jones (who called her a copycat), Isabella Blow, Leigh Bowery, Freddie Mercury, Daphne Guinness, Klaus Nomi, Led Zeppelin, Patti Smith, Boy George, Carole King (Gaga burst into tears when she met her backstage at a concert), the New York Dolls, Prince, John Lennon, Andy Warhol (who, while currently dead, undoubtedly would have declared Gaga "fabulous"), and David Bowie, who has, so far, made no comment on the Gaga body of work. She's been written about in art magazines, and sooner or later, words like Matthew Barney, Marina Abramovic, and Yoko Ono get thrown into the conversation. Reactions to her have come in from all walks of show business and, predictably, they're proo and con. Donny Osmond says he would not let his child watch one of her sexually charged provocative videos. Beyonce, after two sexually provocative videos ("Video Phone" and "Telephone") with Gaga, says, "I always admired her work, She and I had an effortless connection and mutual respect for each other." Two years ago Christina Aguilera claimed she had no idea who Gaga was or whether she was "a man or a woman." (Now, with the release of Aguilera's new album, Bionic, she appears to be both musically and visually more than just a bit influenced by Gaga's sound and vision.) Katy Perry called Gaga's most recent video blasphemous. Cyndi Lauper is a fan. Gaga was dissed for taking herself "oddly serious" by the serious self-serious indie singer Joanna Newsom. Elton John adores Gaga, she performed with him at the Grammys last February and at his annual White Ball in the English countryside. Fox News has called her "poison for the minds of our kids." But despite all the attention, the sold-out world tours, the money, the controversy, the fame and the screaming frenzy that accompanies every step she takes, Gaga has only just recently realized that, at this moment, she is the biggest pop star in the world. "About two weeks ago," she tells me, "I literally realized what had happened in my life. I almost wish it hadn't hit me so late. I wish it had hit me gradually." This revelation occurred while she was on tour somewhere in Australia. "i don't remember what city it was," she says, "but we left venue, and after the show there were 5,000 people standing on stairways and platforms leading to a train station--I couldn't even see how far back. The car drove out, and I said, 'Stop the car,' and I got out and walked out, and the scream was so loud, it was a roar. I went over ti the fence and signed as many autographs as I could without them pulling me through. More fans than ever had been waiting for me outside after the show--meaning they just seen two hours of the most visually intense show, in the heat, standing, jumping, and screaming for two hours--5,000 of them. It was insane. And then, I thought, How could I possibly be better for you? That's all I keep thinking: I just want to be better for you. I want to say and sing the right things for you, and I want to make that one melody that really saves your spirit that one day." Native New Yorker Lady Gaga hrew up on Manhattan's West Side and attended a private girls' school on the fancier Upper East Side, where she felt like a freak and some of the rich girls were mean to her. She was the daughter of middle-class parents, her mother, Cynthia, and her father, Joseph, worked for telecommunications companies. She gravitated to her family's piano at age four (and eventually took classical piano lessons with a teacher who tied Gaga's wrists together while she had to play scales). Later, voice lessons with renowned New York vocal coach Don Lawrence (who had worked with Mick Jagger, Axl Rose, Christina Aguilera, and Bono) encouraged her showbiz dreams. She says she was a "bad" girl who snuck out of her parents' house to Smalls and Arthur's Tavern to see "what was going on." And when you're born and bred in New York City, especially Manhattan, you don't have a to go somewhere else to be somebody. You already feel like you're somebody, or you're already where the somebodies are. Everything was available to her: she could sneak 80 blocks downtown to perform in clubs and eventually dance on top of bars with actual drag queens; she didn't have to read about it in magazines. She didn't have to take a bus to New York City, ask a taxi driver to deposit her at the center of everything, and get dropped off in Times Square--New Yorkers know from birth that Times Square is a tourist hellhole and the center of nothing. And while a sense of sophisticated entitlement doesn't always fuel big drive or big ambition, lack of drive and/or ambition was certainly not the case when it came to Lady Gaga. "I just bought my parents a Rolls-Royce for their anniversary," she tells me, "because I knew that they would never buy anything like that for themselves. They spent all their money on sending me and my sister, Natali, the the best school in the city, where I saw lots of girls that had no real grasp on reality. Then I'd go home, where I was bot allowed to just come and go as I please or go on playdates like everybody else. It was much stricter. My dad's Italian. Boyfriends were a no-no until I was 16 years old. I was probably more dysfunctional than anyone in our family--I dated a 28-year-old when I was 16; I dated a 38-year-old when I was 19. Actually, i don't even know that I would use the word 'dated.' But something inside of me felt like I was living in a delusional world; I wanted to know what the real world was all about. And I used to pray every night that God would make me crazy. I prayed that God would teach me something, that he would instill in me a creativity and a strangeness that all of those people that I loved and respected had." Gaga, who currently "works with" "spiritual guides," believes that her creativity began before she was conceived. "My father's sister Joanne died when she was 19 and he was 16. And when my mother was engaged to marry my father, they were staying in his house, where he grew up, and a light came into the room and touched her stomach and went away. She believes that Joanne came into the room and sort of O.K.'d her for my dad and that Joanne transferred her spirit into my mom. So I was born, it's almost as if {i was} her unfinished business. She was a poet and a real Renaissance woman, pure of heart--just a beautiful person. She died a virgin. And one of guides told me he can feel I have two hearts in my chest, and I believe that about myself." Funky but Chic The Gaga presentation wouldn't work without the hit songs, but quite the presentation it is. With the help of her Haus of Gaga team (headed by creative director Matt Williams and stylist Nicola Formichetti), Gaga has appeared in videos, on TV, at award shows, and in "real life" wearing--including but not limited to--a coat made up of Kermit the Frog Muppets, a telephone atop her head, a dress made of oscillating rings, a stripped vinyl sheath (on a transatlantic fight, no less), sunglasses made out of cigarettes, antler headbands, a lobster hat, Marie Antoinette wigs, red lace veils with matching crown, bras spurting fire, catsuits made of bones and Ace bandages, and shoes and boots and accessories by Hermes, Chanel, Yves Saint Laurent, Nina Ricci, Armani, Noritaka Tatehana, Nasir Mazhar, and her "very close friend" the late Alexander McQueen. She wore a red latex dress when presented to Queen Elizabeth, to whom she bowed because, she says, "I respect her. She was very nice. I just love a strong-ass woman." But along with fame and fortune come the inevitable lawsuits. Gaga is currently being sued by a former producer and self-described ex-boyfriend for $30.5 million, which he feels he's entitled to for song royalties, coming up with her "stage" name, and whatnot. While Gaga can't discuss a pending lawsuit, she's clearly no amused. "Nobody made me," she says, "Nobody fuckin' made me who I am today. And what is so funny is that everyone was spitting in my face and treating me like dirt and making me feel so worthless..." She sighs. "The price that a woman pays for people destroying you over and over again... I'm a fuck' lion. I'm a lion, and I can't be destroyed. The things U have been through, the things I have seen, the people I have taken care of... I would not take any of it back, because it's made me the writer that I am. But how dare anyone that treated you like dirt on the bottom of their shoe try to turn around and tell you that they made you? The minute that you have a glimpse of sunlight on your eyelids, they fuckin' made you that mascara." As for her stage name, she says, "One day I texted my friend Tom and asked him what he thought of 'Lady Gaga' and he loves it and I was like, O.K., that's it." "Want to see what's in my purse?," Gaga asks, picking up a white Birkin bag covered with fan-created graffiti, most of it in Japanese and, she says, some Taiwanese. She takes out a bottle of water, a Chanel sleep mask, seven pairs of sunglasses, a figurine of Michelangelo's David, Chanel Gardenia perfume, a tampon, acid-reflux medicine, Wite-Out, six studded Hermes and Chanel cuffs, some talisman she says was blessed in a Buddhist temple to keep her healthy, and Xanax. "I have anxiety," she says, "and it's so funny... this morning I was placing Xanax in my hand and I said, 'i knew this day would come.'" "I bought the bag," she continues, "because Matt Williams, my creative director and closest friend, said, 'You must buy a Birkin because it's the most classic bag.' I hate all purses; I used to buy cheap, punk-looking, sloppy bags in New York, and I would stud them with stuff. I had a glue gun, and I used to glue rhinestone studs, sequins, mirrors. The disco bra from the 'Just Dance' video I made with my own two hands. So I bought this Birkin, I carried it, and then I saw stuff on the Internet like 'Oh, Gaga holding a Birkin getting on a private plane--so much for hating money.' So here is the irony: the most classic and iconic bag on the planet, but my fans don't relate to it because it represents something they don't have. So how do I create and make it into a performance-art piece in itself? My fans are more iconic than this purse. And I live fashion, but I don't love it more than my fans. And that's what this bag is all about." Her relationship with her fans, whom she calls "Little Monster," is intense, to say the least. It borders on the kind of hysteria once reserved for the like of Judy Garland or Michael Jackson, but the difference is that Gaga really, really seems to love them just as much right back. She's going to need a lot of storage space for the thousands of books, paintings, and sketches sent to her by her fans. "You would not believe the books," she says. "I can't in my heart throw any of them away, because it took them so much time. The stories, they break my heart: 'My mom left when I was young'; 'I'm gay ,my friends at school don't like me'; 'I'm overweight, I get beat up, your music helped me lose 50 pounds'... "The other day my mother calling me crying," Gaga says, "and she said, 'Your sister needs you.' I said, 'What happened?' One of my sister's best friends died, and they're not sure how she died, but she was quite troubled. And it's people like that that I want to help. It's not being No.1; it's not selling the most records. It's what you do when you're at the top to inspire and influence and save the people that lift you. I love my fans more than any artist who has ever lived, and I mean that so genuinely. I've looked every man that I've ever dated in the eye and every woman I've ever been friends with and there will never be something I put before my fans. It's all about loving who you are. I don't want people to love me; I want them to love themselves. I have a relentless pursuit in me to give everything in me to my fans to make them feel good about themselves. And if you don't like it, well, then don't come to the party." Love Games What with her nonstop touring, videos, side projects (she's creative director for Polaroid, is involved with Beats by Dr. Dre, has done a MAC Viva Glam campaign with Cyndi Lauper), writing all the songs for her next album--set for an early-2011 release--and all that intense dedication to her fans, there hasn't been a lot of time for a private life. Much has been made of Gaga's self-proclaimed, occasional bisexuality. She alludes to faking it with men with her "Bluffin' with my muffin" lyric in "Poker Face," but she blushed when Barbara Walters referenced the line on network TV. Now she tells me, "I don't really have sex. Well, sometimes. but I'm drawn to bad romances. And my song ["Bad Romance"] is about whether I go after those of relationships or if they find me. I'm quite celibate now; i don't really get time to meet anyone. My relationships with my gay friends have a purity and love that's so simple because we don't want anything from each other except friendship. Whereas my relationships with straight men are always abusive, always tumultuous, always emotional. I do fuck, but I'm certainly not promiscuous. And it's very different now too, because when you're younger and nobody knows who you are and you're in a bar and you meet some nice guy, you know, and maybe a week goes by and you sleep with him, it's really no big deal. But now it's like when you let someone into your world... I don't trust anybody. And I don't know if I ever will. I don't trust that wineglass there. But it's O.K. It's the trade-off." "I'm perpetually lonely. I'm lonely when I'm in relationships. It's my condition as an artist. listen, I prayed for a lunacy, and he gave it to me. It's a bit of a sick thing when a 17-year-old says in her nightly prayers that i would rather die young and a legend than be married with children and die an old lady in my bed. I also think I'm afraid of depleting my energy. i have this weird thing that if I sleep with someone they're going to take my creativity from me through my vagina." Lady Gaga was initially signed by Island/Def Jam Records, wrote songs for other singers got dropped by Island/Def Jam, and eventually signed to Interscope Records. Jimmy Iovine says, "When she first came in her, she looked like one of my cousins. You know, like an Italian girl from New York. But she was talking about what she wanted to do and how she saw culture... i said, 'Let's do it.' I knew that her record was a hit. And we pushed it... She's saying to people, 'I grew up a freak, an outcast, and I'm you.' Plus she's easily one of the five most professional people I've ever worked with." You're living in Los Angeles now. Do you drive? Gaga: I don't have a license yet, but I have a permit, and my manager, Troy [Carter], and my A&R guy, Vincent [Herbert], bought me a 1990 red Rolls-Royce Corniche. Her name is Bloody Mary, and I've been driving it all around my Bel-Air neighborhood. It's a real representation of freedom and sense of self for me, because I didn't learn drive when I was very young--it's kind of this sense of accomplishment and escape. I just get in the car and I drive, and I never thought I would drive. I just go get coffee or... Coffee? Can you go around incognito? I've tried. I do do that. I'll dress like a club kid from New York on my off days, just like my friends all dressed, a little heavy metal. But they still recognize you? Everywhere. My fans can smell me. But a good day off for me on the road is when I'll get super trashed at, like, a really divey, trashy bar... How can you go to a trashy bar and not get mobbed and hassled? I think it's the way that I carry myself. It's like if you want people to look at you, they're gonna look at you, and if you want to go buy a melon at the store, they won't. How often do you want--or need--to go to the store to purchase a melon? I went to the grocery store the other day--I figure out a way. it's so funny, though, when people say to me, "Who is the real Gaga?" I'm fuckin' Gaga. I don't know who I am if I'm not Gaga. This is not like Paul Stanley putting on makeup in Kiss. No... but it's so funny when people ask me, because it's like, You're kidding me, right? I'm Gaga, and I live and breathe it every day. I've said that if there was a movie about my life I would title it Born This Way. Before the Rolls-Royce, the hits, the "Little Monster" nation, the Birkin, and the paparazzi, there was just baby Gaga on her own, on the Lower East Side. "About six years ago I moved downtown to Stanton Street," she says, "and I lived there for three years. In a tiny, 400-square-foot apartment--just me and my keyboard, with the kitchen in the living room and the turntable next ti the toaster. I had my keyboard and my bed and a dream. i had jobs, paid my own rent, and made music by myself. first it was a very inspired time--just leaving my parents and forcing myself to survive on my own." But then, she did a lot of drugs. "Mostly cocaine," she says. " I have had some friends that have heroin problems, but I have never done heroin, I've snorted it, never really looked at it whenever it's been in the room. I'm terrified of heroin." She says that she spent all her money on drugs and that the apartment became a nightmare. "I was so high I couldn't see the roaches beneath my feet. I used to do lines on a Bible in my room." As for whether or not she still indulges in drugs at all, she says, "I won't lie: it's occasional. And when i say occasional, i mean maybe a couple times a year. I really can't do cocaine anymore. I haven't done it in, oh, probably six months." She recalls one day when "I was laying in my bed on my stomach--this is so sick-- but I was eating a salad, and I got a phone call: Can you be at this restaurant in 30 minutes? So-and-so big record executive wants to meet you. And the salad was like a really unhealthy salad; it was like fried chicken or something. So I said, 'I'll be right there.' I got up, went to the bathroom, threw up the salad, did a line of coke went to the meeting. I was completely mental and had just been through so much. But if you print that, I do not want my fans to emulate that or be that way. I don't want my fans to think that they have to be that way to be great. it's in the past. It was a low point, and it led to disaster." And when she got seriously messed up on drugs, she didn't go to rehab: "I went home. To my parents." January 8, 2006, was, says Gaga, the worst day of her life, and a day, she says, she has not spoken publicly about until now. She learned she was dropped from Island/Def Jam, and she hints at a particularly breakup. "All I will say is I hit rock bottom, and it was enough to send a person over the edge. My mother knew the truth about that day, and she screamed so loud on the other end of the phone, I'll never forget it. And the she said, 'I'm coming to get you.' And I remember laying on the pullout bed in the basement in my parents' house, and I said to my mom, 'Can we go see Grandma?' And we didn't even call her; the next morning we got up at the house and I told my 82-year-old grandma everything. I cried. i told her o thought my life was over and I had no hope and I've worked so hard, and I knew I was good. What would I do now? And she said,'I'm gonna let you cry for a few more hours. And then after those few hours are up, you're gonna stop crying, you're gonna pick yourself up, you're gonna go back to New York, and you're gonna go back to New York, and you're gonna kick some ass.'" Video Gaga Lady Gaga's style and performance art started when she began collaborating with her downtown--New York friend D.J. Lady Starlight. The she met designer-D.J. Matt Williams in an L.A. restaurant and they instantly connected. When I ask Gaga what Williams was doing then, she replies, "Sleeping with me." Their rumored romantic relationship has been an on-and-off one--but more importantly, she says, "I hired him: he designed album covers and clothing for me, and he's the inspiration of the beginning of my fashion." According to Williams, who turned Gaga on to Paris Is Burning, the acclaimed documentary about the 1980s Harlem drag-queen balls, "We're joined at the hip. I haven't had time off in three years. We work hard, but with the impact she's had and how she's changing the world, i don't think you can work hard enough. If some 12-year-old kid knows that gaga collaborated with artist Terence Koh, and he Googles him and finds his gallery-- it opens up a whole world to an art scene that kid may have never found. All this inspiration wouldn't normally even be accessible to these kids. There's just been a hunger for something new and different on a mass scale; it's just been so bland for he past few years." How can you tour so much? Aren't you working too hard? Gaga: You know what? It's kind of like when you run a marathon and somebody hands you a glass of water; you don't fuckin' stop and sit down. You throw it back and you keep going. I've been eating shit my whole life in terms of my career-- Your whole life? A few years in clubs with people occasionally booing? Well, I are shit for about four or five years. And I was in offices of attorneys and record labels when I was 15. Did you keep a list? Oh, you'd love that list. Several of your videos show you poisoning men. It seems to be a recurring theme. Someone recently texted me, "Why do you keep killing all your boyfriends in your videos? Are you gonna kill me?" I'm like... I don't know why, I don't really know. You poison a boyfriend in "Telephone" I don't technically kill him in that video. Beyonce does. I'm just assisting her. Do you think people don't get your humor? The "Paparazzi" video, which you did with director Jonas Akerlund, shows you on crutches and in a wheelchair. it's certainly not politically correct, but I think it's hilarious. Was that your intention? Of course it was. Listen--the intention of that video was to show the hilarity to which people will fame-whore themselves. it was playing with the idea that I knew my style was something that people really were admiring. So I thought, Well, what's the most ridiculous thing that we could immortalize? Something not fashion at all and make it fashion. Ans I was at a lot of Helmut Newton books and photographs, and thee were all these disabled women who look fabulous. So I though watching the celebrity fall apart is so fascinating to everybody, why don't I just fall apart for seven minutes and see what happens. The hilarity of the wheelchair being covered in diamonds... Did you get protests from organizations for the physically challenged? No, I had girls in wheelchairs crying to me at meet-and-greets, telling me that when they saw that video it changed their lives. And while my fascination with celebrity has almost left the building, I had this incredible fascination with how people love watching celebrities fall apart, or when celebrities die; I wanted to know, what they look like when they died? Marilyn Monroe, Princess Diana, JonBenet Ramsey... I think all these dead girls, these blonde, dead icons. What did they look like when they died? So then I thought, Well, maybe if I show what I look like when I die, people won't wonder. Maybe that's what I want people to think I'll look like when I die. After Gaga leaves the Beverly Hills Hotel, I do a sweep-around of the bungalow to make sure nothing has been left behind. A room-service table holds the half-eaten crab cakes and green salad that was the Gaga's dinner. The bathwater has not been drained. And there, on the floor of one of the bathrooms, are a pointy black bra and some sort of G-string/panty concoction with silver metal chains attached. This all may or may not be her daily underwear or her rehearsal clothes for the "Alejandro" video. And leaving them lying around is more common, in this world, than you might think. As a friend says to me, "These girls are just used to leaving their underwear all over town." Milk Studios, Los Angeles: The following morning, I deliver the undergarments intact in a pink plastic hotel laundry bag to Gaga at the V.F. cover shoot, and she shrieks with delight. "My favorite!! I wondered where I left them!!" These days, it's hard for Gaga to keep her best. She misses New York, she tells me. "Right now, it's good for me to be in the sunlight, and sometimes I just sit on my porch and turn my head up, and the view is so amazing. But i think of New York... and I miss it, and I start to get emotional and cry." She gets emotional, too, when discussing a video message she received the night before from 300 fans: "They said, 'To Mother Monster, thanks for giving us a voice.'" When asked how she would feel if all this disappeared, she says, "If today I were to go back in time, if it never happened or if it all went away, i would still be on a bar making music. i mean, not on purpose. But I'm sitting here with you today as if I've sold no music and no one knows who I am, starving for more inspirationm more music, I am so hungry." New York City, June 22: We catch up. Gaga has recently been heavily featured in the New York tabloids for (a) showing up at her sister Natali's high-school graduation wearing a beekeeper's hat, (b) going to a Mets game in bejeweled underwear and giving the finger (two, actually) to paparazzi, and © reportedly--in black bikini underwear topped by a pin-striped Yankee jersey--drunkenly making her way into the Yankees clubhouse, where she fondled her breasts after a game. What's going on? Is she having a meltdown? "I'm doing great," she says, "so great. I'm not having a breakdown--I'm happier than I've ever been. I've been in my father's ares for two weeks wishing him a happy Father's Day. Of course I got drunk at Yankee Stadium; I was with my girlfriends... but everybody was so nice and sweat, and I met half the team. I don't know where that bit about me fondling my tits came from; I think people want to make me look like a slutty Italian girl--which I am--but I wasn't doing that at the game. Why would I rub my tits in front of the Yankees? I'm not interested in dating any ballplayers." As for the brouhaha at the Mets game, all she wants to say about that is she went with a group of friends for someone's birthday, wanted to sit in the nosebleed seats and not cause a commotion, but cameras were planted everywhere. She had too many shots of whiskey, and as for giving the finger(s) to photographers, she says."Well, I guess I was my true New York 24-year-old Italian girl who grew up here and how dare you set me up? I want to go to things like ball games, but when I go to the ball game, they're going to write the story that will sell papers. Look, I'm not an idiot--I recognize that if I'm a public figure and I'm going to be recognized if I'm wearing a bikini or a potato sack. The trade-off is I get to see the Yankees, and what the Yankees mean to me in my soul as a young person from New york is more important to me than my reputation in terms of the tabloids. my real fans know who I truly am, and they know what I represent and what I mean, and my music and my performance is what really speaks." And the beekeeper's hat at the sister's graduation? "My sister loves me; my sister loves the way I dress--she was raving about my hat all day long. I brought her a ton of present, we had the time of our lives, and I'm so proud of the woman she's become. i was there for my family. I wasn't there for anybody else that day, and if people don't like what I wore to my sister's graduation, I don't know why they were taking photos." Since we last talked, she's been halfway around the world on tour and she was tested for lupus. "I had feart palpitations and some trouble breathing," she says, "and while I don't think it was connected, i got tested for lupus because my aunt Joanne died from it, and it's not uncommon to test positive for it if it's in your family. I just have to take care of myself and not run myself into the ground." How's that working out for her with the anxiety and the Xanax? "I'm not having anxiety and I haven't been taking Xanax for a while." She hints that she's seeing someone "new." (Rumors are that it's an old boyfriend, the drummer who reportedly once broke her heart.) I hear a man's voice in the background, then she puts him on the phone to say hello. but what about all those fears that sex will steal her creativity? "Well," she laughs, "I am afraid all that, but that doesn't mean that I don't confront my fears. Head-on." The biggest change in her life, despite her earlier remarks to me about loving sunlight and sitting on her porch and driving around L.A., is that Gaga now hates Hollywood, she says. "I got rid of my place, and I'm coming back to spend more time in New York. Everyone in Hollywood is so awful, and awful to me; everyone just wants you to fail. There's no fervor for the fantasy of music anymore. It's all bout No. 1s and who's on iTunes, and while I'm on iTunes and I'm No. 1, I still care about the fervor of show business and music and womanhood." Can she get any privacy in New York--especially going out in public in those getups? "I'm not going to change who I am, and New Yorkers know about me and they don't give a shit. I am my music; I am my art; I am my creativity. When I look into a crowd my shows, I feel like I'm looking into tiny little disco-ball mirrors and I'm looking into myself. And when I wake up in the morning, that's what makes my heart tick."}} Article by Lisa Robinson, photography by Nick Knight Vanity_Fair.jpg Vanity Fair (Alternate 02).jpg Vanity Fair (Alternate 1).jpg Vanity Fair 601 (2).jpg Vanity Fair 601 (3).jpg Vanity Fair 601 (4).jpg Vanity Fair 601 (5).jpg Vanity Fair 601 (6).jpg Vanity Fair 601 (7).jpg Vanity Fair 601 (8).jpg Vanity Fair 601 (9).jpg Vanity Fair 601 (10).jpg US: January, 2012 :Article by Lisa Robinson, photography by Annie Leibovitz Category:Magazines